I had the same issue. I disabled the Smartthings skill for Alexa and re-enable and the Routines started working. It kept my groups intact so no extra work there. However, it does add every Smartthings device you have to Alexa. Spent some time cleaning that up.

Still no luck for me… It is very strange as I can’t imagine Alexa has any way to differentiate a physical sensor from a simulated sensor in Smartthings.

I have now tried this 4 different times. Each of the 4 physical sensors successfully fired an Alexa Routine and each of the 4 simulated sensors failed to fire an Alex Routine despite reflecting the state change on the device detail screen in the Alexa App.

I appreciate any other suggestions from anyone… I am not expecting that I will get much help from Amazon support on this.

I tried Amazon Support. First person had no idea what I was talking about and I quickly suggested and got transferred to a supervisor. Unfortunately I don’t think the supervisor really understood the situation completely but got them to submit a ticket to engineering. The problem is that I don’t know if the supervisor really got the details of my problem onto the ticket. She kept making references to what phrase I was using to trigger the Alexa Routine despite my repeatedly correcting her that I am triggering the routine with a sensor. I now have to wait 1 to 3 days for a response.

Still no luck for me… It is very strange as I can’t imagine Alexa has any way to differentiate a physical sensor from a simulated sensor in Smartthings.

I have now tried this 4 different times. Each of the 4 physical sensors successfully fired an Alexa Routine and each of the 4 simulated sensors failed to fire an Alex Routine despite reflecting the state change on the device detail screen in the Alexa App.

I appreciate any other suggestions from anyone… I am not expecting that I will get much help from Amazon support on this.

My guess, and it’s purely a guess, is that it has to do with the DTH for the virtual sensor.

Maybe those who have it working could let us know exactly which DTH they are using and if they have modified in anyway.

I had the same issue. I disabled the Smartthings skill for Alexa and re-enable and the Routines started working. It kept my groups intact so no extra work there. However, it does add every Smartthings device you have to Alexa. Spent some time cleaning that up.

I may have forgotten all my devices first before disabling the skill - I can’t remember exactly. Perhaps if I did that is why I lost my groups.

As for Alexa adding all ST devices back - that is controlled by the ST Alexa app where you can have it just add everything from ST by default or manually choose. I do the latter so it doesn’t add dupes of devices that get added from other services (like Wemo for example).

I had the Alexa smartapp setup that way too but I didn’t realize it would reset to allow all devices when the Smartthings skill was reauthorized and a device discovery was run. No lasting harm done, only took a few minutes to delete devices from alexa that didn’t need to be there.

I have also been using the standard Simulated Contact Sensor DTH with no modification. Given I can see the states changes of my Simulated Contact Sensor correctly in the Device Detail screen on the Alexa App, I am assuming it must be an issue on the Amazon side. The Alexa App allows me to create a routine that is triggered by the Simulated Contact Sensor and it accurately captures the state change of the Simulated Contact Sensor, but for some reason the Routine does not execute.

I like that we can use routines to make custom announcements, the next thing to figure out is how to make random announcements… something other than making multiple routines for each random announcement.

I like that we can use routines to make custom announcements, the next thing to figure out is how to make random announcements… something other than making multiple routines for each random announcement.

If you don’t mind a slight delay, you can daisychain this.

Have the primary echo routine turn on a virtual switch.

Have the virtual switch trigger a web core piston to randomly select a virtual contact sensor to turn on.

Have an echo routine for each of those contact sensors with a different phrase for each one.

You could also probably just do the whole thing in webcore to start with, Ending up with the random virtual contact sensor to open.